> On 2021-02-20, at 6:51 PM, ken.dickey at whidbey.com wrote:
> 
> Device drivers are, for me, complex and painful.

I don't think I've ever met anyone for whom that is not the case.

Writing an entire OS seems to me to be a Quixotic dream; why bother?  Yes, I know Dan Ingall's famous quotation -
"An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one."

However, I think that one can look at this rather differently than "have no operating system". I think the practical approach is  "have nothing that doesn't fit in your language system". If we make a system that can talk to everything that an underlying OS kernel and facilities provides - device drivers, scheduling, interrupt handling, storage abstraction, network blah-blah-blah - then there is no OS as a separate thing that anyone need care about. There are no "things that don't fit into a language".

The simple answer to approach this quite closely and fairly painlessly is to use an install of some linux system without the X-nightmare and use the frame buffer as the Smalltalk display. Yes, sure, there are other minimal OS' that Ken pointed out too.

One would still need to work out how to handle all the facilities we take for granted for our daily use of a computer; a *good* email system, web browsing, assorted social media interfaces and on and on. I suggest that we also need to make it practical in this new world to have many Smalltalk images running at the same time so as to insulate said email/browser/twitter/etc from each other in case of serious problems, so we'd want some sort of (Smalltalk implemented, obviously) windowing system.

It's doable. I think it might take a bit more than the usual 



tim
PS Random number sigline chooser FTW, again!
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Porting is such sweet sorrow


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